Letters: Concern about Obama's 'czars' misplaced

On July 8, The Chronicle printed a letter from Pat Matthews, who wrote that “This administration has appointed 32 ‘czars’ (and counting), to oversee government departments and report directly to the president, again bypassing any input from our elected Congress.” I’m concerned that some readers might be alarmed over comments in that letter and think that something sinister and corrupt is going on in the Obama administration, so I’d like to review a few simple facts to clarify the periodic controversy over “czars.”

There are, of course, no positions in the federal government that are, or ever have been, officially called “czars.” “Czar" is only an odd nickname that stuck to certain advisors and levels of management in the executive branch. It just became easier for the news media to refer to, for example, the “drug czar,” instead of the actual title of “Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.”

Republicans like “czars,” too. The label of “czar” has come and gone throughout U.S. history, but its use really took off in modern times after Republican President Richard Nixon appointed his Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, William E. Simon, to a new role in charge of all energy-related matters. Time magazine dubbed Simon “Nixon’s Decisive New Energy Czar” in its Dec. 10, 1973, issue. Even the comic “Doonesbury” ridiculed the name, and Simon, in some of its 1974 strips.

“Czars" are not new. The real explosion in the number of “czars” took place under Republican President George W. Bush. Since “czar” is not a real title, identifying them can be hopelessly imprecise and politically charged. Indeed, conservative radio host Glenn Beck has written on his website that a “czar” can be “somewhat in the eye of the beholder.”

With that in mind, the web site Wikipedia has tried to count them objectively in an entry entitled “List of executive branch czars.” Analyzing that entry, one can learn that President Clinton had a total of eight “czars.” Then President George W. Bush stepped in, eliminating five of Clinton’s “czars,” keeping three, and then creating 30 brand-new “czars” that had never existed before (still the presidential record for new “czar” creation), for a total of 33.

When President Barack Obama came in, he dumped 19 of Bush’s “czars” (for tasks such as bird flu, birth control, etc.), retained the rest, revived three of Clinton’s, and then added 21 new “czars” of his own (for tasks concerning Asian carp, the Great Lakes, etc.), for a total of 37 — more than mentioned in Matthews’ letter. Open-minded people should wonder why Bush’s creation of literally dozens more new “czars” than his predecessors occurred without any notice or concern, while Obama, establishing, at most, a handful of additional “czars” than Bush, is accused of grave constitutional overreach.

Some of Obama's 37 “czars” are already gone. In an act of unprecedented political overkill, the 2011 federal budget included amendments by Republicans in Congress to deny funding for four of the president’s “czars.” This was the first time in U.S. history that a Congress has tried to tell a president how to staff the executive branch. (It should go without saying that all four of the unfunded “czars” were creations of Obama, not Bush.)

However, the New York Times reported on April 16 that “All of the positions affected by the budget bill are vacant or have been eliminated,” and that “the White House has already reorganized the way it is handling these vacant czar jobs.” To some extent, the tasks of those “czars” were completed, while others were absorbed by other agencies. For example, the “health care czar” existed for help in drafting health care reform legislation (now law), and the “car czar” worked so that U.S. auto companies that received government loans would reorganize responsibly, to assure eventual repayment of that money.

Opponents of “czars” have not offered a clear solution to the crisis they have conjured up. It’s true that some congressional Republicans have submitted a bill demanding that all “czars” be ratified by the U.S. Senate, but they have overlooked the fact that many “czars” they condemn are already required to get such approval, and in fact have gotten it.

For example, one name that often pops up in concerns over “czars” is Obama’s “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein, a longtime University of Chicago law professor and author of more than 30 books on government and public policy. Sunstein, endorsed for his “czar” job (one originally created by Bush) by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal, was ratified by the Senate by a vote of 57-40, and, before that, the 17-member bipartisan Senate committee that conducted hearings on Sunstein recorded just one objection to his nomination. Sunstein has gone through the very process that “czar” critics have called for, yet he remains vilified as somehow illegitimate.

Today’s efforts to make “czars” accountable to Congress are clearly partisan politics at its most transparent. These “czar” obsessions just did not exist for the 40 years of “czars” before Obama. And one can expect that when the next Republican president takes office, suggestions about making all those future Republican White House “czars” subject to Senate approval will promptly and quite predictably vanish.

The next time you hear warnings about the dangers of Obama’s “czars,” recall the five points above, and you’ll realize that it’s just another unfair, unbalanced attack on a president we’re lucky to have.